Ahmet Tanpinar - The Time Regulation Institute

Atatürk was clearly influenced by Western notions of maximizing the efficiency of individual citizens. His clock towers not only cheaply propagandized the virtues of regularity, constancy, punctuality, and precision; the Western-style workday, which divided life into compartments — time carefully allocated for work, study, recreation, and the rest — promised greater economic productivity and endowed time itself with monetary value.

Irdal, however, has savored another kind of life, one in which idleness, or wasting time, is a source of happiness. As in A Mind at Peace , Tanpınar again evokes the modernism of the everyday — one opposed to the alienated linear time of top-down modernity. But the setting is pastoral rather than urban, and the mood is nostalgic as Irdal contrasts the easy luxuries and fulfillments of his childhood with the individual liberations promised by the modern state.

The freedom I knew as a child was of a different kind. First, and I think most significantly, it was not something I was given. It was something I discovered on my own one day — a lump of gold concealed in my innermost depths, a bird trilling in a tree, sunlight playing on water.

Irdal dates his fall from this Eden to the time he is given a watch: “My life’s rhythms were disrupted, it would seem, by the watch my uncle gave me on the occasion of my circumcision.” From then on, he is a citizen of modern Turkey, expected to do his bit as an individual producer and consumer to boost its collective power. Asked by Halit Ayarcı to wear a bureaucrat’s drab uniform, Irdal can sense

a dramatic shift in my entire being. New horizons and perspectives suddenly unfurled before me. Like Halit Ayarcı, I began to perceive life as a single entity. I began to use terms like “modification,” “coordination,” “work structure,” “mind-set shift,” “metathought,” and “scientific mentality”; I took to associating such terms as “ineluctability” or “impossibility” with my lack of will. I even made imprudent comparisons between East and the West, and passed judgments whose gravity left me terrified. Like him, I began to look at people with eyes that wondered, “Now, what use could he be to us?” and to see life as dough that could be kneaded by my own two hands. In a word, it seemed as if his courage and powers of invention had been transferred to me, as if it were not a suit at all but a magic cloak.

But, as Tanpınar shows, sometimes relentlessly, Irdal drifts further away, as he grows older, from any ideal of serenity and contentment. Though “born into a family fallen on hard times” he has had quite a happy childhood. “So long,” Irdal writes, “as we are in harmony with those around us — assuming, of course, the right balance — poverty is never as terrifying or intolerable as we might think.” In Istanbul, he knows the desperate loneliness and petty jealousies of people in relatively affluent but atomized societies. His professional career turns out to be a procession of empty and futile postures. His private life is marred by multiple broken friendships and unhappy marriages. He is hounded by a series of absurd people, among them a wealthy aunt who hilariously rises from the dead to torment him.

Tanpınar uses Irdal to take aim at many aspects of Kemalist Turkey: counterfeit tradition, for instance, as exemplified by Irdal’s projected history of a seventeenth-century clock maker called Ahmet Zamanı Efendi, which tries to provide a respectable pedigree to the Kemalist state’s tinkering with the old temporal order, and heals its ruptures with the past. As part of Atatürk’s invention of tradition, the freshly minted Turkish Historical Association had indeed introduced a new history of Turkey, in which Turks became a primarily ethnic rather than religious community. Unlike Mümtaz in A Mind at Peace , who cannot get on with his account of an eighteenth-century Ottoman poet, Irdal manages to finish his book. There is, however, a problem: this account of a traditional herald of Turkish modernity, renamed Ahmet the Timely, is mostly bogus, depicting him, among other impostures, at the Ottoman siege of Vienna.

As Irdal writes, “Unfortunately a handful of armchair academics tried to spoil the fun, being so impertinent as to suggest that such a figure had never actually existed and dismissing the book as a complete fabrication.” But his boss, Ayarcı, assures him that

as important as creating a movement is maintaining its momentum. In extending our movement to the past, you have intensified its forward momentum. In addition you have shown that our forbears were both revolutionary and modern…. Is history material only for critical thought? Can we not stumble upon someone from the past whom we love and enjoy? Oh, you’ll see how pleased everyone will be with our work!

The Ottoman past that Tanpınar once wished to retrieve for his project of synthesis appears in The Time Regulation Institute as a plaything of frauds and charlatans. Unlike Nuran in A Mind at Peace , who knows her musical tradition and can sing, Irdal’s sister-in-law can only screech grotesquely and mutilate old songs. “Our life is a tale without a plot or a hero,” Osip Mandelstam wrote about another spiritually marooned people, “made up out of desolation and glass, out of the feverish babble of constant digressions.” Tanpınar’s novel, too, has the anarchic, bleak, and almost uncontrollable energy of the “modernism of underdevelopment,” which, as Marshall Berman pointed out,

is forced to build on fantasies and dreams of modernity, to nourish itself on an intimacy and a struggle with mirages and ghosts. In order to be true to the life from which it springs, it is forced to be shrill, uncouth and inchoate. It turns in on itself and tortures itself for its inability to singlehandedly make history — or else throws itself into extravagant attempts to take on itself the whole burden of history.

That peculiar torment is very palpable in The Time Regulation Institute . And so is its attempted resolution. Like Tagore and Tanizaki before him, Tanpınar upheld the felt experience — the small joys and sorrows — of ordinary life against the dehumanizing abstractions and empty promises of modern ideologies. No longer seeking, as he did in A Mind at Peace , an immutable cultural identity in Istanbul’s past, he places himself on the side of the fragmentary and the gratuitous against the imperatives of history and progress.

Tanpınar returns often to the question of human freedom — a theme that clearly preoccupied him a great deal and gave metaphysical ballast to his critique of secular modernity:

The privilege I most treasured as a child was that of freedom…. Today we use the word only in its political sense, and how unfortunate for us. For I fear that those who see freedom solely as a political concept will never fully grasp its meaning. The political pursuit of freedom can lead to its eradication on a grand scale — or rather it opens the door to countless curtailments.

The political pursuit of freedom can lead to its eradication on a grand scale. The Time Regulation Institute is to be savored, among other things, for the brilliance of such insights. Tanpınar presciently feared that to embrace the Western conception of progress was to be mentally enslaved by a whole new epistemology, one that compartmentalized knowledge and concealed an instrumental view of human beings as no more than things to be manipulated.

Irdal’s career as the Kemalist state’s functionary achieves its apotheosis when he becomes an architectural designer for the Time Regulation Institute and is praised for his “unusual staircases and the two unnecessary bridges connecting them to the main building.” But the makeover cannot but remain tragically incomplete. For Irdal, ushered late into the modern world, feels that